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Pluto's atmosphere does not collapse
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/09/06 11:07 CDT | 1 comments
Just four months ago I posted about a paper recently published by Leslie Young and coauthors that described three possible scenarios for Pluto's atmosphere. Yesterday, Cathy Olkin, Leslie Young, and coauthors posted a preprint on arXiv that says that only one of those scenarios can be true. And it's a surprising one. The title of their paper says it all: "Pluto's atmosphere does not collapse."
Pluto on the Eve of Exploration by New Horizons: Is there an ocean, or not?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/08/02 08:00 CDT | 5 comments
Does Pluto have an ocean under its ice? If it doesn't now, did it ever have one? How will we know?
Pluto on the Eve of Exploration by New Horizons: A problem of cartography
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/07/30 05:44 CDT | 6 comments
Last Thursday at the Pluto Science Conference there was a surprising and interesting talk by Amanda Zangari, who pointed out a serious problem with Pluto cartography.
Pluto on the Eve of Exploration by New Horizons: Small moons, dust, surfaces, interiors
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/07/24 09:04 CDT | 5 comments
My roundup from notes on the day's presentations on dust in the Pluto system and the surfaces and interiors of Pluto and Charon.
New names for Pluto's little moons Kerberos and Styx; and a new moon for Neptune
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/07/15 01:37 CDT | 4 comments
Pluto's moons, formerly known as "P4" and "P5," are now named Kerberos and Styx; I thought I'd help place them into context with a little help from Cassini. Also, Neptune now has a 14th known moon.
New Horizons: Encounter Planning Accelerates
Posted by Alan Stern on 2013/05/17 10:18 CDT | 4 comments
Back in 2005 and 2006, when Pluto’s second and third moons (Nix and Hydra) were discovered, searches by astronomers for still more moons didn’t reveal any. So the accidental discovery of Pluto’s fourth moon by the Hubble Space Telescope in mid-2011 raised the possibility that the hazards in the Pluto system might be greater than previously anticipated.
Pluto's seasons and what New Horizons may find when it passes by
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/05/02 03:42 CDT | 5 comments
New Horizons might see a Pluto with a northern polar cap, a southern polar cap, or both caps, according to work by Leslie Young.
2011 HM₁₀₂: A new companion for Neptune
Posted by Alex Parker on 2013/04/30 04:20 CDT | 2 comments
This month my latest paper made it to print in the Astronomical Journal. It's a short piece that describes a serendipitous discovery that my collaborators and I made while searching for a distant Kuiper Belt Object for the New Horizons spacecraft to visit after its 2015 Pluto flyby.
When will New Horizons have better views of Pluto than Hubble does?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/18 04:22 CST | 7 comments
Last week, I posted an explainer on why Hubble's images of galaxies show so much more detail than its images of Pluto. Then I set you all a homework problem: when will New Horizons be able to see Pluto better than Hubble does? Here's the answer.
Why can Hubble get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/14 12:37 CST | 15 comments
How come Hubble's pictures of galaxies billions of light years away are so beautifully detailed, yet the pictures of Pluto, which is so much closer, are just little blobs? I get asked this question, or variations of it, a lot. Here's an explainer.
New Contest: Name the Moons of Pluto!
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2013/02/11 11:41 CST | 15 comments
The discoverers of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons are inviting the public to vote on (and write in candidates for) their formal names. Voting closes in two weeks.
DPS 2012: Double occultation by Pluto and Charon
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/26 03:12 CDT | 5 comments
A few talks at last week's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting discussed observations of a double occultation -- both Pluto and Charon passing in front of the same star.
Citizen "Ice Hunters" help find a Neptune Trojan target for New Horizons
Posted by Alex Parker on 2012/10/09 12:15 CDT | 1 comments
2011 HM102 is an L5 Neptune Trojan, trailing Neptune by approximately 60 degrees. This object was discovered in the search for a New Horizons post-Pluto encounter object in the Kuiper Belt.
A fifth moon for Pluto, and a possible hazard for New Horizons
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/07/16 02:55 CDT | 7 comments
Pluto is now known to have at least five moons (Charon, Nix, Hydra, P4, and the newly discovered P5), and its burgeoning population might pose a risk to New Horizons during its flyby, three years from now.
Salacia: As big as Ceres, but much farther away
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/06/26 12:27 CDT | 10 comments
A newly published paper shows trans-Neptunian object Salacia to be unexpectedly large; it's somewhere around the tenth largest known thing beyond Neptune. It has a companion one-third its size, making it appear similar to Orcus and Vanth.
What Saturn's moons can tell us about comets (Notes from LPSC 2012)
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/04/03 05:20 CDT
My notes on a two-part presentation by collaborators Jim Richardson and David Minton about the sizes of things in the Kuiper belt, a story they told by looking at Saturn's moons. How does that work? What connects Saturn's moons to the Kuiper belt is craters.
Where are the big Kuiper belt objects?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/16 05:35 CST | 6 comments
Earlier today I wrote a post about how to calculate the position of a body in space from its orbital elements. I'm trying to get a big-picture view of what's going on in trans-Neptunian space.
Posted by Meg Schwamb on 2011/06/08 02:43 CDT
On May 5 and 6, I had a run on the WIYN (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO) telescope, a 3.5 m telescope, the second largest telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona.
Posted by Meg Schwamb on 2011/05/25 08:30 CDT
The last decade has seen an explosion in our understanding of the solar system with the discovery of the largest Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) of comparable size to Pluto.
LPSC 2011: Day 1: Small bodies
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/08 12:28 CST
Here are some of the noteworthy items from the morning's session on "Small Bodies: A Traverse from NEOs to TNOs" and the afternoon's session on "Asteroid Geophysics and Processes: Surfaces and Interiors."
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